D Carnegie Quotes

the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability,” said John D., “than for any other under the sun.

John D. Rockefeller said, “the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

Le monde est plein d’individus avides et égoïstes. C’est pourquoi l’être exceptionnel qui s’efforce de servir autrui généreusement et sans arrière-pensée possède un énorme avantage sur le reste de l’humanité, car il ne rencontre guère de concurrence.

I'm sorry I was short with him--but I don't like a man to approach me telling me it for my sake. "Maybe it was," said Wylie "It's poor technique." "I'd all for it," said Wylie. "I'm vain as a woman. If anybody pretends to be interested in me, I'll ask for more. I like advice." Stahr shook his head distastefully. Wylie kept on ribbing him--he was one of those to whom this privilege was permitted. "You fall for some kinds of flattery," he said. "this 'little Napoleon stuff.'" "It makes me sick," said Stahr, "but it's not as bad as some man trying to help you." "If you don't like advice, why do you pay me?" "That's a question of merchandise," said Stahr. "I'm a merchant. I want to buy what's in your mind." "You're no merchant," said Wylie. "I knew a lot of them when I was a publicity man, and I agree with Charles Francis Adams." "What did he say?" "He knew them all--Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Astor--and he said there wasn't one he'd care to meet again in the hereafter. Well--they haven't improved since then, and that's why I say you're no merchant." "Adams was probably a sourbelly," said Stahr. "He wanted to be head man himself, but he didn't have the judgement or else the character." "He had brains," said Wylie rather tartly. "It takes more than brains. You writers and artists poop out and get all mixed up, and somebody has to come in and straighten you out." He shrugged his shoulders. "You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important-especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside.

America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings of $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American Life until 1914. People would never be this rich again. Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party - possibly the most preposterous ever staged - several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry's, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback.

Eveillez d’abord un ardent désir chez la personne que vous voulez influencer... Celui qui en est capable a le monde avec lui, celui qui ne l’est pas reste seul.

Happy the man, and happy he alone, He, who can call to-day his own: He who, secure within, can say: “To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d to-day.

I don’t care if your first name’s “Carnegie” and your last name’s “Mellon,” you’d probably be waitlisted now.

This man declared that during all that time he had never heard Owen D. Young give a direct order to anyone. He always gave suggestions, not orders. Owen D. Young never said, for example, “Do this or do that,” or “Don’t do this or don’t do that.” He would say, “You might consider this,” or “Do you think that would work?” Frequently he would say, after he had dictated a letter, “What do you think of this?

He’d never been one for self-improvement—never even gotten through Dale Carnegie’s book about making friends and influencing people because ten pages in he realized he didn’t care what anyone else thought.

Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I'm getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before committing it to print. The best thing you can do as a beginning writer is to write, write, write - and read, read, read. Concentrating on publication prematurely is a mistake. You don't pick up a violin and expect to play Carnegie Hall within the year - yet somehow people forget that writing also requires technical skills that need to be learned, practiced, honed. If I had a dollar for every person I've met who thought, with no prior experience, they could sit down and write a novel and instantly win awards and make their living as a writer, I'd be a rich woman today. It's unrealistic, and it's also mildly insulting to professional writers who have worked hard to perfect their craft. Of course, then you hear stories about people like J.K. Rowling, who did sit down with no prior experience and write a worldwide best-seller...but such people are as rare as hen's teeth. Every day I work with talented, accomplished writers who have many novels in print and awards to their name and who are ‘still’ struggling to make a living. The thing I often find myself wanting to say to new writers is: Write because you love writing, learn your craft, be patient, and be realistic. Anais Nin said about writing, "It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."

In the heyday of his activity, John D. Rockefeller said that ‘the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee.’ ‘And I will pay more for that ability,’ said John D., ‘than for any other under the sun.

If you could design a new structure for Camp Half-Blood what would it be? Annabeth: I’m glad you asked. We seriously need a temple. Here we are, children of the Greek gods, and we don’t even have a monument to our parents. I’d put it on the hill just south of Half-Blood Hill, and I’d design it so that every morning the rising sun would shine through its windows and make a different god’s emblem on the floor: like one day an eagle, the next an owl. It would have statues for all the gods, of course, and golden braziers for burnt offerings. I’d design it with perfect acoustics, like Carnegie Hall, so we could have lyre and reed pipe concerts there. I could go on and on, but you probably get the idea. Chiron says we’d have to sell four million truckloads of strawberries to pay for a project like that, but I think it would be worth it. Aside from your mom, who do you think is the wisest god or goddess on the Olympian Council? Annabeth: Wow, let me think . . . um. The thing is, the Olympians aren’t exactly known for wisdom, and I mean that with the greatest possible respect. Zeus is wise in his own way. I mean he’s kept the family together for four thousand years, and that’s not easy. Hermes is clever. He even fooled Apollo once by stealing his cattle, and Apollo is no slouch. I’ve always admired Artemis, too. She doesn’t compromise her beliefs. She just does her own thing and doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing with the other gods on the council. She spends more time in the mortal world than most gods, too, so she understands what’s going on. She doesn’t understand guys, though. I guess nobody’s perfect. Of all your Camp Half-Blood friends, who would you most like to have with you in battle? Annabeth: Oh, Percy. No contest. I mean, sure he can be annoying, but he’s dependable. He’s brave and he’s a good fighter. Normally, as long as I’m telling him what to do, he wins in a fight. You’ve been known to call Percy “Seaweed Brain” from time to time. What’s his most annoying quality? Annabeth: Well, I don’t call him that because he’s so bright, do I? I mean he’s not dumb. He’s actually pretty intelligent, but he acts so dumb sometimes. I wonder if he does it just to annoy me. The guy has a lot going for him. He’s courageous. He’s got a sense of humor. He’s good-looking, but don’t you dare tell him I said that. Where was I? Oh yeah, so he’s got a lot going for him, but he’s so . . . obtuse. That’s the word. I mean he doesn’t see really obvious stuff, like the way people feel, even when you’re giving him hints, and being totally blatant. What? No, I’m not talking about anyone or anything in particular! I’m just making a general statement. Why does everyone always think . . . agh! Forget it. Interview with GROVER UNDERWOOD, Satyr What’s your favorite song to play on the reed pipes?

Two decades later, when I got my PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, I thought that made me infinitely qualified to do anything, so I dashed off my letters of application to Walt Disney Imagineering. And they sent me the nicest go-to-hell letter I'd ever received.

Another time he felt himself reenacting a conversation with father, a long talk about duty and honor and all the reasons why enlisting was the right thing to do. It was a talk they'd had several months ago, and Frank had agreed with everything his father had said, only this time Frank found himself taking a contrary opinion. What the hell's so honorable about it? Duty to whom? To myself, or the guys who would be fighting without me, or to the people here at home afraid of the Hun? Or duty to President Wilson, or to Carnegie, or to God, or to all the fallen soldiers before me, to Great-grandad Emmett and his bleached bones down at Antietam?

Ethical actions can often entail short-term pain, but will always result in long-term gains. By contrast, unethical actions frequently have short-term gains, which make them so attractive. But I guarantee that unethical actions will always result in some form of long-term pain and ultimate collapse, frequently in unexpected ways.

The word aristocrat itself was becoming almost a curse throughout the North, and travelers’ reports of the South’s pestilence-ridden, barefooted backwardness were staples of the northern press. It was implicitly understood, as one historian put it, that “two profoundly different and antagonistic civilizations . . . were competing for control of the political system.

He’d never been one for self-improvement—never even gotten through Dale Carnegie’s book about making friends and influencing people because ten pages in he realized he didn’t care what anyone else thought. But that was before Elizabeth—before he realized that making her happy made him happy. Which, he thought, as he grabbed his tennis shoes, had to be the very definition of love. To actually want to change for someone else.

You were on the spot, but you came through with flying colors, and we want you to know the firm is proud of you. You’ve got the stuff—you’re going a long way, wherever you’re working. This firm believes in you, and is rooting for you, and we don’t want you to forget it.’ “Effect? The people go away feeling a lot better about being fired. They don’t feel ‘let down.’ They know if we had work for them, we’d keep them on. And when we need them again, they come to us with a keen personal affection.

They were liberating Harrisonville, showing the hypocrites and phonies and $$$-squirrelers and chokeragged Yesmen some puffed-up balls. They were widening the mental horizons of a town more narrow-minded than its streets; they were missionaries laboring amon their bloodkin: montheytheistic theocentric cousins and uncles who swore allegiance to Uncle Sam, Jim Crow, Oral Roberts, and Dale Carnegie; they were waging their impudent revolution against people they'd cowedly called "sir" all their teenage lives.

The man began speaking to me. “When I was a boy, I worked as a messenger for the telegraph company. The sky was even darker from the mills then than it is today, and on bad days, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. To deliver my messages in the allotted time, I had to memorize the streets because I couldn’t always see where I was going. Sometimes, I’d have to assist deliverymen who’d lost their way by walking along the curb with one hand on their horses. From this experience, I learned that when you’ve gone astray, a helping hand will always emerge from the darkness.

She wondered how people would remember her. She had not made enough to spread her wealth around like Carnegie, to erase any sins that had attached to her name, she had failed, she had not reached the golden bough. The liberals would cheer her death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat fresh food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they'd press a button on a wall to get warm. The whole time complaining about big oil.

for Jared Lyman (March 28, 1975-February 3, 2012) A man who knew how to love people. For his son's twenty-fifth birthday (sixteen years from now) he wrote: No Unlesses I love you and I'm proud of you You might be watching this from prison If so - I love you and I'm proud of you If you're watching this from backstage at Carnegie Hall - I love you and I'm proud of you. It doesn't really matter where you are or what you're doing... I will always be proud of you and I will always love you. I think that's what I'd say. I almost said “Unless...” But I couldn't think of an “Unless” Nope No “unlesses

She was coming over to my place and instead of us hanging with my knucklehead boys—me smoking, her bored out of her skull—we were seeing movies. Driving out to different places to eat. Even caught a play at the Crossroads and I took her picture with some bigwig black playwrights, pictures where she’s smiling so much you’d think her wide-ass mouth was going to unhinge. We were a couple again. Visiting each other’s family on the weekends. Eating breakfast at diners hours before anybody else was up, rummaging through the New Brunswick library together, the one Carnegie built with his guilt money. A nice rhythm we had going.

He was not only playing now, but playing everything before now, that miracle of a concert at Esterhazy, the way they'd sung at Carnegie Hall the first time. Time rolled out through his arm in hot waves. And though he was still playing, he looked around (no longer bound by time, anyway.) Jana, wide-eyed and angular, only her parted lips betraying the glass-like fragility he loved in her. Brit, round-faced, still freckled, more freckled after all these years, not looking at him, giving him his space, which he appreciated. And Daniel, glancing at him with no expression at first and the subtlest of understanding, continuing to play his own rock-solid part, even leading a little extra, picking up whatever Henry had left behind.

he had never heard Owen D. Young give a direct order to anyone. He always gave suggestions, not orders. Owen D. Young never said, for example, "Do this or do that," or "Don't do this or don't do that." He would say, "You might consider this," or "Do you think that would work?" Frequently he would say, "Maybe if we were to phrase it this way it would be better." He always gave people the opportunity to do things themselves; he never told his assistants to do things; he let them do them, let them learn from their mistakes. A technique like that makes it easy for a person to correct errors. A technique like that saves a person's pride and gives him or her a felling of importance. It encourages cooperation instead of rebellion. p237-238

What’s the best thing you’ve done in your work and career? In business decision-making, certainly one of your highlights was licensing your computer operating system to IBM for almost no money, provided you could retain the right to license the system to other computer manufacturers as well. IBM was happy to agree because, after all, nobody would possibly want to compete with the most powerful company in the world, right? With that one decision, your system and your company became dominant throughout the world, and you, Bill Gates, were on your way to a net worth of more than $60 billion. Or maybe you’d like to look at your greatest career achievement from a different angle. Instead of focusing on the decision that helped you make so much money, maybe you’d like to look at the decision to give so much of it away. After all, no other person in history has become a philanthropist on the scale of Bill Gates. Nations in Africa and Asia are receiving billions of dollars in medical and educational support. This may not be as well publicized as your big house on Lake Washington with its digitalized works of art, but it’s certainly something to be proud of. Determining your greatest career achievement is a personal decision. It can be something obvious or something subtle. But it should make you proud of yourself when you think of it. So take a moment, then make your choice.

The bad news is, everyone looks great on paper and in interviews, but everyone also looks exactly the same. People have figured out how to present themselves as competent, qualified managers who won’t make waves and who won’t make mistakes—but nobody is able to say, “I’ve got ideas that are really new and different!” People are afraid to present themselves as innovators, and consequently innovation itself has become a lost art. This is a problem for American business. But it’s also a golden opportunity for anyone who values originality and knows how to put it to work. You can instantly set yourself apart from the crowd by focusing on what you’ll do right instead of what you won’t do wrong. To do that, you’ll need insight about your strengths and weaknesses, and intelligence about how to maximize your contribution. But most of all you’ll need inspiration—the power to create energy and excitement by what you say, how you look, and above all, what you do. Those are some of the topics we’ll be talking about in this chapter. As a first step toward making yourself unforgettable to others, consider how you see yourself in your own eyes. Image is built upon self-perception. If your self-perception is out of sync with the way you want to be perceived, you will have a hard time making a positive impression—especially if you’re not even fully aware of the problem. This happens to many people. For some reason, we tend to think less of ourselves than we’d like. We also tend to have a lower opinion of ourselves than other people have of us. It

My son Aaron, who is a professor of computer science, encountered just such a careless signal when he was on the admissions committee at Carnegie Mellon University. One Ph.D. applicant submitted a passionate letter about why he wanted to study at CMU, writing that he regarded CMU as the best computer science department in the world, that the CMU faculty was best equipped to help him pursue his research interests, and so on. But the final sentence of the letter gave the game away: I will certainly attend CMU if adCMUted. It was proof that the applicant had merely taken the application letter he had written to MIT and done a search-and-replace with “CMU” . . . and hadn’t even taken the time to reread it! Had he done so, he would have noticed that every occurrence of those three letters had been replaced.

Thus, when the banker John Pierpont Morgan left a fortune of $68 million in 1914, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie is supposed to have remarked pityingly that he had by no means been “a rich man.”203 Carnegie’s own fortune and those of industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Andrew W. Mellon were over half a billion dollars. The rapidity of the concentration of wealth may be gauged from the fact that the largest American private fortunes grew from about $25 million in 1860 to $100 million twenty years later and $1 billion two decades after that. By 1900 the richest man in the United States had assets worth twelve times more than those of the richest European (who was a member of the English aristocracy); not even the Rothschilds (finance), the Krupps (steel, machinery, weapons), or the Beits (British/South African gold and diamond capital) were in the same league.

THERE WAS NO RUSH going down the fire stairs. I’d had enough exercise for one day. When I hit the lobby I didn’t make for the street, but cut through the narrow passage leading to the Carnegie Tavern. I always buy myself a drink after finding

Rockefeller “The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit — a reputation,

woke up to the nightmare that she’d betrayed the man of her dreams.

I’d have given him twice the cash if I had it on me.

Many famous motivational speakers and influencers will tell you that you can get whatever you want in life but I will never tell you that. Do you know who else would not say that? Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. But people love to be lied to and love entertaining fantasies, so they say I'm the one who doesn't know enough and that's why my thinking is limited. Well, have they tried to sell anything on a Chinese website or through an American or Canadian platform like Shopify? Many even tell me they plan to start their business using WordPress, which shows how ignorant they are of what their dreams need to become true. In reality, as soon as you start going through these paths you will see that you are stopped along the way. Many apps don't work in your country, and many markets are also not open to you due to location. In other cases, they claim to investigate you before deciding if you should have access to their features, while what they do is to simply look at your IP address. This happens to any industry, including the book industry.

I made it a rule,” wrote Franklin, “to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiment of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbade myself the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix’d opinion, such as ‘certainly,’ ‘undoubtedly,’ etc., and I adopted, instead of them, ‘I conceive,’ ‘I apprehend,’ or ‘I imagine’ a thing to be so or so, or ‘it so appears to me at present.

Harry H. Laughlin was highly important for the Nazi crusade to breed a “master race.” This American positioned himself to have a significant effect on the world’s population. During his career Laughlin would: ~ Write the “Model Eugenical Law” that the Nazis used to draft portions of the Nuremberg decrees that led to The Holocaust. ~ Be appointed as “expert” witness for the U.S. Congress when the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was passed. The 1924 Act would prevent many Jewish refugees from reaching the safety of U.S. shores during The Holocaust. ~ Provide the "scientific" basis for the 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case that made "eugenic sterilization" legal in the United States. This paved the way for 80,000 Americans to be sterilized against their will. ~ Defend Hitler's Nuremberg decrees as “scientifically” sound in order to dispel international criticism. ~ Create the political organization that ensured that the “science” of eugenics would survive the negative taint of The Holocaust. This organization would be instrumental in the Jim Crow era of legislative racism. H.H. Laughlin was given an honorary degree from Heidelberg University by Hitler's government, specifically for these accomplishments. Yet, no one has ever written a book on Laughlin. Despite the very large amount of books about The Holocaust, Laughlin is largely unknown outside of academic circles. The Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. gave this author permission to survey its internal correspondence leading up to The Holocaust and before the Institution retired Laughlin. These documents have not been seen for decades. They are the backbone of this book. The story line intensifies as the Carnegie leadership comes to the horrible realization that one of its most recognized scientists was supporting Hitler’s regime.

When I talk about “creative living” here, please understand that I am not necessarily talking about pursuing a life that is professionally or exclusively devoted to the arts. I’m not saying that you must become a poet who lives on a mountaintop in Greece, or that you must perform at Carnegie Hall, or that you must win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. (Though if you want to attempt any of these feats, by all means, have at it. I love watching people swing for the bleachers.) No, when I refer to “creative living,” I am speaking more broadly. I’m talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.

The reason people miss opportunities is because they come dressed in overalls, or work clothes, and they look like work.

than any

D.F.T. file, “Damn Fool Things I’ve Done,” to remind himself of his missteps: “Was introduced to 2 women today—forgot the name of one instantly.

You have to respect your audience. Without them, you’re essentially standing alone, singing to yourself.” —K.D. Lang

Charles Schwab was paid a salary of a million dollars a year in the steel business, and he told me that he was paid this huge salary largely because of his ability to handle people. Imagine that! A million dollars a year because he was able to handle people! One day at noontime, Schwab was walking through one of his steel mills when he came across a group of men smoking directly under a sign that said No Smoking. Do you suppose that Charles Schwab pointed at the sign and said, “Can’t you read?” Absolutely not, not that master of human relations. Mr. Schwab chatted with the men in a friendly way and never said a word about the fact that they were smoking under a No Smoking sign. Finally he handed them some cigars and said with a twinkle in his eye, “I’d appreciate it, boys, if you’d smoke these outside.” That is all he said. Those men knew that he knew that they had broken a rule, and they admired him because he hadn’t called them down. He had been such a good sport with them that they in turn wanted to be good sports with him. —DALE CARNEGIE

The captains of industry did not exactly distinguish themselves as publicly spirited. A few, like Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, established noted charities, but most echoed the sentiments of William H. Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, who, when asked by a reporter for the New York Times about keeping open the New York to New Haven line on the assumption that it was run for the public benefit, responded famously, “The public be damned.” Vanderbilt proceeded to give the reporter a short lecture on capitalism. “I don’t take stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody’s good but our own because we are not. Railroads are not run on sentiment, but on business principles, and to pay.

von Ahn, PhD, (TW: @LuisvonAhn, duolingo.com) is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the CEO of Duolingo, a free language learning platform with more than 100 million users.

Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon’s father had written to him that “a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable.

En la plenitud de su actividad, John D. Rockefeller dijo que “la habilidad para tratar con la gente es un artículo que se puede comprar, como el azúcar o el café”. “Y pagaré más por esa capacidad —agregó— que por cualquier otra.

Dear Ms. Garland, I am writing this to you And I’m hoping you can read this from up above Your passing made me sadder Cause your singing made me gladder And I thought I’d write this to tell you so Judy you made me love you I didn’t want to do it I didn’t want to do it Judy you made me love you And I wish you knew it I really want you to see this I know that you’ve ascended to heaven up above And when I get there too I can tell you you’re the one I love Judy, you know you’ve made me love you. 13

It is unbelievable, how can this blacksmith say such brilliant words. I believe that this short sentence which consists of only three words will soon be broadcasted far away, and Mr. Carnegie will hold the title of a business philosopher. In fact, he deserves to be praised by people like this. Doesn’t the fact that he is able to condense his successful life into a short sentence show the great wisdom of this business mogul?

HILL: Will you describe the major factors which entered into the modus operandi of Mr. Ford’s mind while he was perfecting the automobile? CARNEGIE: Yes, that will be very easy. And when I describe them, you will have a clear understanding of the working principles used by all successful men, as well as a clear picture of the Ford mind, viz.: (a) Mr. Ford was motivated by a definite purpose, which is the first step in all individual achievements. (b) He stimulated his purpose into an obsession by concentrating his thoughts upon it. (c) He converted his purpose into definite plans, through the principle of Organised Individual Endeavour, and put his plans into action with unabating persistence. (d) He made use of the Master Mind principle, first, by the harmonious aid of his wife, and second, by gaining counsel from others who had experimented with internal combustion engines and methods of power transmission. Still later, of course, when he began to produce automobiles for sale, he made a still more extensive use of the Master Mind principle by allying himself with the Dodge brothers and other mechanics and engineers skilled in the sort of mechanical problems he had to solve. (e) Back of all this effort was the power of Applied Faith, which he acquired as the result of his intense desire for achievement in connection with his Definite Major Purpose.

In December 1896, a humbled Carnegie at last consented to a sweeping deal.

Sometimes, on the road to where we are going or where we want to be, we have to do things that we’d rather not do. Often when we are just starting out, our first jobs “introduce us to the broom,” as Andrew Carnegie famously put it. There’s nothing shameful about sweeping. It’s just another opportunity to excel—and to learn.

Carnegie had seriously misjudged developments in the ore business.

In fact, the bargain had been Carnegie’s belated attempt to redress his own error.

As with oil, ore prices skidded lower, bankrupting marginal producers and bolstering the Rockefeller-Carnegie alliance.

Rockefeller now left Andrew Carnegie far behind and probably had at least twice as much money as Carnegie did.

This system of charitable giving increased exponentially during the early 1900s when the first multimillionaire robber barons, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Russell Sage, created new institutions that would exist in perpetuity and support charitable giving in order to shield their earnings from taxation.

I would like to have known, for example, what Mrs. Job thought about God destroying her entire family over a stupid bet. Or how Mrs. Noah felt to have her children safe on the ark with her while she watched everyone else’s children drown. Or how Mary stood it when the Romans drove nails straight through her boy’s hands. I know the ones writing were prophets and saints and all, but it wouldn’t have helped them any in Miss Wilcox’s classroom. She still would have given them a D.

Long before Feeney popularized giving while living, the early-twentieth-century philanthropist Julius Rosenwald preached the same gospel—with a remarkably similar slogan, “Give While You Live.” The founder of Sears, Roebuck, Rosenwald’s name is now largely forgotten precisely because he didn’t emulate contemporaries like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in creating a permanent foundation. Yet Rosenwald may have had as much impact as either philanthropist because of what he did do, which was to sink a lot of his fortune into helping build 5,300 schools for black children throughout the South. It was the kind of huge up-front capital investment that a more cautious foundation, mindful of preserving its endowment, would never have made. But Rosenwald’s cash and boldness had a transformative effect on African-American chances in the Jim Crow South, where his schools educated the likes of John Lewis, who helped lead the civil rights movement long after Rosenwald was gone.

America's wealthy believed in the power of the “individual,” grounded in the sociological theory known as “Individualism.” It held that individuals free to act on their instincts and abilities created wealth and advanced society. Individualism, according to steel baron Andrew Carnegie, was the “foundation” of an advancing society. In America, it's “the leaders who do the new things that count, all these have been Individualistic to a degree beyond ordinary men and worked in perfect freedom …”11 The laboring class suffered not from class divisions and lack of opportunity, but from their individual shortcomings, according to the theory. The “failures which a man makes in his life are due almost always to some defect in his personality, some weakness of body, or mind, or character, will or temperament,” wrote oil baron John D. Rockefeller.12

in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some difference,

Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that one of the simplest, most obvious and most important ways of gaining good will was by remembering names and making people feel important—yet how many of us do it?

Not being able to study the cream of the crop means the effects we see will probably be weak and sporadic. That means having to collect an enormous amount of data to gain confidence in the results. Fortunately there is also an advantage to studying ordinary people. If Joe Sixpack, our randomly picked “man off the street,” can show weak but positive results in the lab, then it indicates that the siddhis are part of a spectrum of abilities that are broadly distributed across the population. It is much easier to accept the reality of a claimed skill if it turns out to be a basic human potential rather than an extreme idiosyncrasy that only a handful of people in the world possess. I suspect that there are those among us who have high-functioning siddhis gained not through extensive meditation practice but through raw talent. Like Olympic athletes or Carnegie Hall musicians, these people are rare. Based on my experience in testing a wide range of participants in laboratory psi tests, I’d estimate that perhaps one in ten or a hundred thousand have exceptional skills comparable to the traditional siddhis.

came home from work one evening to find his youngest son, Tim, kicking and screaming on the living room floor. He was to start kindergarten the next day and was protesting that he would not go. Stan’s normal reaction would have been to banish the child to his room and tell him he’d just better make up his mind to go. He had no choice. But tonight, recognizing that this would not really help Tim start kindergarten in the best frame of mind, Stan sat down and thought, “If I were Tim, why would I be excited about going to kindergarten?” He and his wife made a list of all the fun things Tim would do such as finger painting, singing songs, making new friends. Then they put them into action. “We all started finger-painting on the kitchen table—my wife, Lil, my other son Bob, and myself, all having fun. Soon Tim was peeping around the corner. Next he was begging to participate. ‘Oh, no! You have to go to kindergarten first to learn how to finger-paint.’ With all the enthusiasm I could muster I went through the list talking in terms he could understand—telling him all the fun he would have in kindergarten. The next morning, I thought I was the first one up. I went downstairs and found Tim sitting sound asleep in the living room chair. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I’m waiting to go to kindergarten. I don’t want to be late.’ The enthusiasm of our entire family had aroused in Tim an eager want that no amount of discussion or threat could have possibly accomplished.

On June 28, 1974, the front page of the New York Times asserted that the program “by which the Federal Government is compelling colleges and universities to hire more women and blacks is lowering standards and undermining faculty.” The article—on the page with news of Watergate, Nixon’s visit to Moscow, and the ongoing energy crisis—continued, “Moreover, it is charged that new minority and women appointees may be paid more than white male faculty members at the same level and that some do not have the proper qualifications for the tenured and untenured positions to which they are appointed.” The article was based on a newly released report by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. The author, Richard Lester, had considerable stature: he had been vice-chairman of Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women and was an economics professor and former dean of the faculty at Princeton. He supported efforts to diversify faculties. His quarrel, he said, was with the process. The competition for “the limited number of minority academicians” had “at times driven up salaries ‘well above those for whites with equivalent or better qualifications.’ ” Lester had based his conclusions not on hiring data, but on meetings he’d conducted with administrators at twenty leading institutions, which went unnamed. (About fifteen hundred colleges had federal contracts, requiring them to file affirmative action plans.) The Times article noted, toward the bottom, that “the charge that women and minorities are not prepared [to be] as potentially excellent educators as white males cannot be substantiated.” Lester himself cautioned that abandoning affirmative action would be “premature.” But the damage was done. Other publications piled

When I launched my AI career in 1983, I did so by waxing philosophic in my application to the Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon. I described AI as “the quantification of the human thinking process, the explication of human behavior,” and our “final step” to understanding ourselves. It was a succinct distillation of the romantic notions in the field at that time and one that inspired me as I pushed the bounds of AI capabilities and human knowledge. Today, thirty-five years older and hopefully a bit wiser, I see things differently. The AI programs that we’ve created have proven capable of mimicking and surpassing human brains at many tasks. As a researcher and scientist, I’m proud of these accomplishments. But if the original goal was to truly understand myself and other human beings, then these decades of “progress” got me nowhere. In effect, I got my sense of anatomy mixed up. Instead of seeking to outperform the human brain, I should have sought to understand the human heart. It’s a lesson that it took me far too long to learn. I have spent much of my adult life obsessively working to optimize my impact, to turn my brain into a finely tuned algorithm for maximizing my own influence. I bounced between countries and worked across time zones for that purpose, never realizing that something far more meaningful and far more human lay in the hearts of the family members, friends, and loved ones who surrounded me. It took a cancer diagnosis and the unselfish love of my family for me to finally connect all these dots into a clearer picture of what separates us from the machines we build. That process changed my life, and in a roundabout way has led me back to my original goal of using AI to reveal our nature as human beings. If AI ever allows us to truly understand ourselves, it will not be because these algorithms captured the mechanical essence of the human mind. It will be because they liberated us to forget about optimizations and to instead focus on what truly makes us human: loving and being loved. Reaching that point will require hard work and conscious choices by all of us. Luckily, as human beings, we possess the free will to choose our own goals that AI still lacks. We can choose to come together, working across class boundaries and national borders to write our own ending to the AI story. Let us choose to let machines be machines, and let humans be humans. Let us choose to simply use our machines, and more importantly, to love one another.

a beautiful old Carnegie with a decent selection,

Jane hung up and called her sister, who told her their mother was full of white feminist second-wave claptrap, that she’d always cared more about feeding her own ego than feeding her half-caste children.

Principe 3 – Rappelez-vous que le nom d’une personne est pour cette personne le son le plus doux et le plus important, dans toutes les langues.